I am doing a bit of personal fundraising to cover the expenses for repairing my computer. In all I have to raise $600, but I do not expect people to give me more than $20 a pop. To those who have given me more, thank you so much. To those who have not, thank you as well.

I feel that this kind of helping each other out is useful and ghastly necessary; especially those in the long tail [1] of blogging who have been burned by the evil 'blog hive' pixies who controlled the Advertising Liberally network at BlogAds [2] during the first half of the year.

A lot of us got burned out of advertising revenue by bad decisions that all squarely on the shoulders of the people who did not serve us well. Now that Sean-Paul (of The Agonist [3] fame) is doing a fantastic job at serving us all equitably, we are all seeing ads served on our blogs once again.

It means I've spent 6 months scrapping by on culturekitchen and The Daily Gotham; bootstrapping on blood, sweat and tears. It's the reason why I have had to resort to asking for donations.

I just wrote back to one friend how this reminds me of Steve Gilliard's [4] fundraisers, which would have happened right about this time of year. I'd joke we kept recycling the same $25 bucks, sending it to each other whenever we'd put out a call for help.

Steve used to say that PBS [5] ought to be the model for running blogs like ours. I have to say that it's in a moment like this one that I have to agree with his assessment of the issues.

I'd like to brainstorm about this longer and harder because, for the greater good, I will have to find other ways to sustain the blogs beyond just waiting for ads to pop in our radar ---and realistically speaking, I just don't have the means to hire a advertising sales representative.

So, again, thanks a bunch for donating. I really don't want a new computer. I have more than $5K invested on my hardware and software. I want to give this baby another 2 years of life before making the jump to something new.

Thanks for going to my PayPal page to contribute. [6]

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